Women in the Sacred Landscape of Early Christian Narrative

Despite the explosion of work by New Testament scholars over the past two decades on this literature, we have yet to exhaust the potential illu­mination to be gained by reading early Christian narrative in parallel with Greek romance.^{[59] [60] Here I can do no more than to suggest briefly some fruit­ful avenues for fuller exploration, focusing on representations of women and religion in the double narrative of Luke’s Gospel and Acts, which to­gether supply the largest single narrative block in the New Testament.}

First, the sacred landscape of the Greek novel throws into relief the sub­tle but significant changes Luke makes in the construction of sacred space.^[61] Chariton’s desire to impress the visual presence of the Greek gods on his narrative landscape is matched by Luke’s apparent reluctance to acknowledge it. “The Temple” for Luke means preeminently the Jerusalem temple: otherwise, the only temple in the landscape is the temple of Arte­mis at Ephesus (Acts 19:27).^[62] Like other Jewish apologists, Luke is pre­pared to quote the philosophical poet Aratus as testimony to the God be­hind the gods, the one who gives breath and being to all created life (Acts 17:24-28). But all other manifestations of pagan cult are treated as dan­gerous delusions (Acts 17:29-31; Acts 14:14-18) or loci of hostile power (Acts 19:24-40).^[63] And there is a parallel shift in the perception of civic space. Chariton’s hero and heroine belong to the civic elite and move freely and confidently between the public spaces of the city and the do­mestic luxury of the country villa; even as a slave, Callirhoe is cocooned by the protective status of her master, transported privately by boat and litter from villa to town house to palace.^[64] For Luke’s heroes, by contrast, the open spaces of the city are stress zones, and its civic assemblies are points of danger and hostility.^[65] The emissaries of the gospel move warily in the city’s streets, seeking safe houses (lodging with a tanner by the har­bor; a third-floor tenement room in Troas^[66]) and the protection of a migrant community association.

Where do women fit into this subtly but profoundly different religious landscape? In the New Testament, as in romance, religious sites and festi­vals provide the time and place for significant encounters between men and women. The Jerusalem temple provides a sacred space where women are able to act as religious practitioners (Mary and Anna in Luke 2:22-38) or are exposed to the public gaze (the widow of Luke 21:1-4, or the adul­tera of John 8:1-11). In Acts, the synagogue provides a public sacred space where Paul is able to meet mixed groups that include “god-fearing” women (Acts 13:50; cf. 17:4, 12, 34) - though the Jewish women of Phi­lippi have a more marginal sacred space “beside the river” (Acts 16:13). Within this Jewish-oriented religious world, women’s cultic roles are lim­ited to the traditional biblical practices of prayer and prophecy. There are no priestesses in Luke’s narrative: the only pagan woman who adopts an active religious role in Acts is the Pythia of Acts 16:16-18, fitting a pro­phetic template perhaps easier to accommodate to the biblical pattern. For Luke and his readers, this is an exploitative relationship from which the woman is freed by Paul’s word of exorcism - though, with the customary ambivalence of such tales, she also supplies prophetic testimony to the re­ligious credentials of Paul’s message of salvation. For Luke’s counterpart to the elderly temple attendant who recognizes Callirhoe in the temple of Aphrodite (Chaer. 3.5.4; 3.9.1), we might compare the prophetic figure of Anna who haunts the Jerusalem temple and recognises the coming of the Christ (Luke 2:36-38). Outside the Temple, too, the prophetic inspiration of the Holy Spirit gives women a religious voice: cf.

But the narrative of Acts is also beginning to redefine Christian sacred space to include domestic space (Acts 2:46), and it is in this sphere that women begin to figure in the narrative both as travellers and as patrons to the new community. Thus Lydia, represented as an independent business­woman (and by implication a traveller “from Thyatira”) offers hospitality to Paul in Philippi (Acts 16:40); Priscilla, with her husband Aquila, travels from Rome and hosts a house-church in Corinth and Ephesus (Acts 18:2, 26); Mary (John Mark’s mother) hosts the church in Jerusalem (Acts 12:12); Tabitha acts as benefactor to a Christian group in Joppa (Acts 9:36-41). And we should not forget Sapphira, singled out as of equal sta­tus with her husband in a flawed act of benefaction (Acts 5:1-10).

What lies behind this - and what gives a distinctive religious sig­nificance to the women in New Testament narrative - is the new sacred space constructed around the person of Jesus. Luke 10:38-42 describes an argument between two sisters over hospitality for a visiting teacher. In any other narrative, this would be a domestic scene - there is nothing obvious­ly ‘religious’ about it. But once we accept (as Luke and his readers obvi­ously do) the religious status of the central character, then the whole inter­action acquires potential religious significance, and in turn raises a further set of secondary questions about women’s ministry and discipleship. Simi­larly, John 4 describes a conversation between Jesus and a woman at a well. Is this a religious scene? Only for readers who accept the evangelist’s premise that a Jesus is a figure who in some sense embodies the divine presence.

The reconfigured sacred space created by the person of Christ opens up other dimensions of spirituality for women. The narrative of Acts high­lights the participation of women with men as disciples in “the Way” (Acts 1:14; 5:14; 8:3, 12; 9:2). Tabitha, finding her own distinctively feminine mode of enacting the “community of goods” of Acts 4:32-35, is dignified with a neologism as a “female disciple,” μαθήτρια (9:36). In the gospel narrative, ordinary women, (village women, the women of the streets) play a surprisingly visible role - not in the limited roles assigned to them by traditional religion, but as recipients of divine grace through interaction with Jesus. The διακονία of Peter’s mother-in-law (Luke 4:38-39); the saving faith (η πίστι$ σου σεσωκεν σε) of the “woman who was a sinner” (Luke 7:50) and of the woman with the flow of blood (Luke 8:48); the res­urrection of Jairus’s daughter (Luke 8:55), and of the widow of Nain’s son (Luke 7:11-16);^[71] the blessing of the woman from the crowd (Luke 11:27); the “daughter of Abraham” who is released from Satan’s bonds on the Sabbath and enabled to praise God (Luke 13:11-13) - in the narrative world of the gospels, all of these show that women (and women’s bodies) have the potential to become religious subjects, i.e., sites of encounter with the divine.

And this brings us, finally, to the motif of epiphany, which makes a viv­id foil for understanding the grammar of divine presence in early Christian narrative. Robin Lane Fox rightly identifies the reaction of the Lycaonian crowd to Paul’s healing of the lame man at the gates of Lystra (Acts 14:8­18) as significant for understanding the potential impact of Christian mis­sionaries on a pagan audience - and even more, we might add, of stories like Luke’s on pagan readers.^[72] It is a story that wonderfully evokes the “casual interpenetration” of divine and human worlds that is so character­istic of romance; the healing of the lame man triggers the same kind of wonder and acclamation that greets Callirhoe’s beauty wherever she goes:

When the crowds saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in human form!” Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates: he and the crowds wanted to offer sacrifice. (Acts 14:11-13, NRSV)

What’s happening here is precisely not what the Lycaonians think: Paul and Barnabas are not “gods in human form” (όμοιωθεντες άνθρωποις) but “mortals of like passions with yourselves” (ομοιοπαθείς υμ"ιν άνθρωποι: Acts 14:15). As in the novels, it is only the outsiders - the rus­tics who speak Lycaonian rather than Greek, or the “barbarians” of Malta (Acts 28:6) - who make this kind of jump. Luke is much more reluctant than Chariton to allow any blurring of the boundaries between divine and human: the offering of divine honours to mortals is to be avoided at all costs, and is symptomatic of one of the basic errors of paganism (Acts 14:14-18).

Nevertheless, this programmatic rhetorical move should not distract us from the fact that, within the narrative, Paul and Barnabas have effectively become (just as Callirhoe has) loci of divine power - and as Strelan per­suasively argues, aspects of the healing account (staring eyes, loud voice) would make that very clear to pagan readers.^[74] The Lycaonian acclamation is not so wide of the mark: Paul and Barnabas are divine messengers, and the healings accomplished by Paul and the other apostles are indeed signs of the divine presence. We can begin to see how Acts offers a counterpart to Chariton’s romance, an alternative myth of salvation: where Chariton depicts the triumph of Aphrodite, Luke describes the triumphal progress of Christ (Acts 17:18) across the Mediterranean world from East to West, ac­companied by awe-inspiring “signs and wonders.” And whether Paul likes it or not, within the narrative these manifestations of epiphany link the di­vine presence very clearly with certain divinely-gifted human beings. The physicality of this form of spiritual presence in the popular imagination is highlighted by the fact that it is perceived to be “carried” by inanimate ob­jects such as sweatbands, and even by the apostle’s shadow (Acts 5:15, 19:12).

The association of divine power and individual arete is a prominent theme of Luke’s narrative, one that prefigures aspects of the cult of the saints in late antiquity. But the persistent controversy that swirls about the­se figures shows Luke’s keen awareness of the dangers inherent in the col­location of divine presence and human action. A series of warning narra­tives underline the message that spiritual power is dangerous: it cannot be bought for cash (8:18-23), or used as a magical formula (19.13-19), and it does not bring immunity from the vicissitudes of storm and shipwreck - though it may offer protection from snakebite (28:1-6). In the parallel myth of romance, the prerequisites of divinity are beauty and noble birth: only those who are in reality nobly-born (whatever their present circum­stances) can possibly act as bearers of the divine presence.^[75] For readers of romance, it makes excellent sense that Paul’s ability to survive shipwreck and snakebite would evoke his status as theios aner (Acts 28:4-6).^[76] But Luke cannot allow his readers to draw this conclusion. The apostle is not a god: he is a human envoy, under orders from a very personal deity. His survival, and the survival of the whole ship’s company with him, is a vin­dication both of Paul’s personal integrity and of the power of the God “whose I am and whom I serve” (Acts 27:23).

Starting from very different theological premises, then, Luke’s narrative effectively promulgates a form of henotheism that would be readily com­prehensible to readers of Greek romance. Where Chariton describes the irresistible power of Aphrodite - and the havoc she wreaks in individual lives - across the Mediterranean landscape and reaching beyond the bor­ders of the Greek world, Luke describes the inexorable progress of a new savior-god across the same territory, a savior who (like Aphrodite) is ini­tially resisted but finally proves irresistible. Like Chariton and the readers of romance, Luke sees a continuous chain of divinity between earth and heaven - though he puts the breaks in the chain of being at rather different places. Like Chariton, Luke is interested in exploring the limits of en­chantment, the distinction between vision and reality, between logos and muthos. And for Luke, as for Chariton, the paradox is that the “awe and wonder” of illiterate barbarians has actually - despite the careful critical distancing called for by elite post-rationalism - hit upon something not so far from the truth: for Luke, God has indeed come down in human like­ness.

And this brings us back to the scene with which we began, with Chari­ton’s lyrical description of Callirhoe posing with her baby in her arms, outshining the virgin goddesses in her beauty and purity. The obvious counterpart to this image in the Christian imagination is the figure of the Madonna, the virgin mother displaying her divine child to the world, the embodiment in Christian iconography of the ancient concept of epiphany. It is of course true that the wonder-workers of Luke’s narrative, as well as its hero, are all male: women figure as recipients of divine grace, and even as its heralds and prophets, but not (in the canonical gospels) as its physi­cal agents in their own right. Female arete, in the world of post-biblical narration, can be expressed in terms of martyrdom,^[77] or of ascetic renunci­ation:^[78] but not of the easy elision of the boundaries between human beauty and divine presence that we see in Chariton’s novel. The mere idea of a female deity of visibly seductive form is almost impossible to accommo­date into the symbolic world of biblical narration. The notable exception here, at least in Luke’s Gospel, is the Virgin Mary. She is the one female figure in early Christianity who becomes a site of divine presence in her own right (and ultimately an object of Christian devotion) - if only in vir­tue of her role as the mother of God’s son. Reading this story against the narrative world of Greek romance throws into relief the distinctiveness of Luke’s representation of women and religion - and also opens up some potential routes for exploring how and why the figure of the Virgin came to play such an important role in the development of early Christian devo­tion.

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